Torsten Grust

Professor

Universität Tübingen, WSI
Lehrstuhl für Datenbanksysteme
Sand 13
72076 Tübingen
Room B318

+49 7071 29-78952
+49 7071 29-5958

torsten.grust@uni-tuebingen.de
0000-0002-8279-0493
@Teggy@discuss.systems

📅 Appointments

Send e-mail to my assistant Marina Ketterer to identify a suitable meeting slot (please allow at least two days to arrange such a meeting).

Torsten Grust is a professor of Computer Science at Universität Tübingen, Germany, where he leads the Database Systems research group since 2008. Prior to his move to Tübingen, Torsten has been a professor of Database Systems at TU München and TU Clausthal. Torsten received his Diploma (M.Sc.) in Computer Science in 1994 and his PhD degree in 1999 from Universität Konstanz. In 2000, Torsten was a visiting scientist with the IBM Silicon Valley Laboratories, San Jose, CA, USA.

Torsten performs research into the design, compilation, optimization, and evaluation of a variety of database languages. In this work, he often walks the fine line between database query and programming language technology. His group develops techniques that turn relational database systems into scalable processors also for non-relational query and programming languages. Torsten is at his happiest whenever he finds new evidence that database and programming language research can mutually benefit each other. (Consequently, he is a long-time member of ACM SIGMOD as well as SIGPLAN. ;-)

Upcoming and Recent Activities

• October 2023: I am now co-chairing PVLDB’s Reproducibility effort. Please make the results of your research easily accessible and reproducible for your peers.
• September 2022: I was invited to give an invited talk at the 24th Int’l Symposium on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming (PPDP 2022).
• February 2022: We have won the CS department’s Teaching Award for the 2021/22 semester. Delighted to see our efforts in the lecture hall being recognized. First and foremost: Thank you, students!
• January 2022: I have been elected as one of the 21 members of the Board of Trustees of the VLDB Endowment, starting a six-year term (until 2027).
• June 2021: Together with Christian Duta, I have won the ACM SIGMOD 2021 Reproducibility Award for our paper Functional-Style SQL UDFs With a Capital ‘F’.
• 2020-21: Together with Yuanyuan Tian and Guoliang Li, I co-chaired the VLDB 2021 Demonstration Track whose demos were presented at VLDB 2021 in Copenhagen.
• September 2019: I have won the Dyalog 2019 APL Program Solving Competition (in the professionals category). The fun to keystroke ratio of APL is hard to beat. Thinking in APL — thus thinking in arrays and matrices — may improve your SQL skills. It happened to me. Give it a try!
• July 2019: I have served as SIGMOD 2019 Publicity and Social Media Co-Chair and greatly enjoyed tweeting as @SIGMOD2019.
• March 2019: With Felix Naumann, I co-chaired the PC for the German-speaking (but international) database conference BTW 2019, held in Rostock, March 2019.
• September 2016: Co-Chair VLDB 2016 PhD Workshop. New Dehli, India, September 9, 2016 (jointly with Andy Pavlo, Kamal Karlapalem). The electronic proceedings of this workshop are available as Volume 1671 of the CEUR Workshop Proceedings.
• April 2016—March 2018: Guest Editor Programming Languages for Big Data, a Special Issue of the Journal of Functional Programming
• December 2014: Co-Organizer Dagstuhl Seminar 14511 on “Programming Languages for Big Data (PlanBig)”, December 14-19, 2014 (jointly with James Cheney, Dimitrios Vytiniotis)
• March 2014–November 2017: Member of the EDBT Executive Board
• April 2014–September 2016: Dean of Studies of the Department of Computer Science
• September 2012: Co-Chair XLDI 2012 — International Workshop on Cross-Model Language Design and Implementation. Collocated with ICFP 2012, September 9, 2012.

Membership in Boards, Program Committees

• Board of Trustees of the VLDB Endowment Starting January 2022, I have joined the elected members of the Board of Trustees of the VLDB Endowment (2022–2027).

• Visiting Professorship Since March 2019 I am a visiting professor of the National Institute of Informatics (NII) Tokyo, collaborating with their Information Systems Architecture Science Research Division on query and programming languages.

• Editorial Boards ACM TODS (2016–today), IEEE TKDE (2010–2013)

• Program Committees BTW 2025, SIGMOD 2025, EDBT 2025, VLDB 2024 (tutorial co-chair), DEBT 2023, SIGMOD 2023 (associate editor & reproducibility committee), BTW 2023, PADL 2022, VLDB 2022 (distinguished reviewer award), BTW 2021, SFDI 2020, DBPL 2020, PEPM 2020, VLDB 2020, SFDI 2019, BTW 2019 (PC co-chair), SIGMOD 2019, TaPP 2018, EDBT 2018, SNAPL 2017, BTW 2017 (software demonstrations), SIGMOD 2017, VLDB 2017, IPAW 2016, ICDE 2016 (software demonstrations), SIGMOD 2016, DBPL 2015, Haskell Symposium 2015, SIGMOD 2015, VLDB 2015, EDBT 2015 (software demonstrations), BTW 2015 (software demonstrations), SIGMOD 2014, EDBT 2014, ICDE 2014 (PC vice chair semi-structured and RDF data), FHPC 2013, DBPL 2013, VLDB 2013 (software demonstrations), SIGMOD 2013, EDBT 2013, BTW 2013, ICDE 2012, EDBT 2012, VLDB 2011, CIKM 2011 (group leader semi-structured data processing), ICDE 2011, EDBT 2011, BTW 2011, XSym 2010, CIKM 2010, VLDB 2010, EDBT 2010, ICDE 2010, DataX 2009, VLDB 2009, VLDB 2009 PhD Workshop, SIGMOD 2009, BTW 2009, ICDE 2009, CIKM 2008, DataX 2008, ADBIS 2008, EDBT 2008, EDBT 2008 PhD Workshop, ICDE 2008, VLDB 2007, CIKM 2007, SIGMOD 2006 Undergrad Scholar Awards, EXPDB 2006, CIKM 2006, XSym 2006, QLQP 2006, EDBT 2006 (workshop chair), EDBT 2006 PhD Workshop, ICDE 2006, CIKM 2005, DBPL 2005, WebDB meets IR (co-located with BTW 2005), BTW 2005, VLDB 2005, ICDE 2005, SIGMOD 2004, BTW 2003, VLDB 2002, EDBT 2000 (software demonstrations chair, proceedings editor)

Short Biography

• since 09/08: Full Professor (Database Systems), U Tübingen
• 06/05–08/08: Professor (Database Systems), TU München
• 02/05–05/05: Professor (Database and Information Systems), TU Clausthal
• 04/04–01/05: Interim head of the Database and Information Systems group, TU Clausthal
• 02/04: Habilitation in Computer Science, Tree-Aware Relational Database Systems, U Konstanz
• 11/00–03/04: Assistant Professor, Department of Computer and Information Science, U Konstanz
• 05/00–11/00: Visiting Scientist, IBM DB2 Everyplace Development, IBM Silicon Valley Labs, San Jose, CA, USA
• 10/99: Promotion (PhD) in Computer Science, Comprehending Queries, U Konstanz
• 10/94–04/00: Research and Teaching Assistant, Department of Computer and Information Science, U Konstanz
• 10/89–10/94: Student of Computer Science, TU Clausthal
• Private: I am proud father of Jana and Erik (born 10/02 and 11/05).

Recent Publications

@inproceedings{snakes-on-a-plan,
  author    = {Fischer, Tim and Hirn, Denis and Grust, Torsten},
  title     = {Snakes on a Plan: Compiling Python Functions into Plain SQL Queries},
  year      = {2022},
  isbn      = {9781450392495},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  address   = {New York, NY, USA},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3514221.3520175},
  doi       = {10.1145/3514221.3520175},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2022 International Conference on Management of Data},
  pages     = {2389–2392},
  numpages  = {4},
  keywords  = {SQL, compilation, python, recursion, user-defined functions},
  location  = {Philadelphia, PA, USA},
  series    = {SIGMOD '22}
}

One WITH RECURSIVE Is Worth Many GOTOs

Denis Hirn • Torsten Grust

Proceedings of the 40th ACM SIGMOD Int’l Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD 2021), Xi’an, Shaanxi, China, June 2021.

Learn More PDF YouTube Reproducibility

Functional-Style SQL UDFs With a Capital 'F'

Torsten Grust • Christian Duta

Proceedings of the 39th ACM SIGMOD Int’l Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD 2020), Portland, Oregon, USA, June 2020. Winner of the ACM SIGMOD 2021 Reproducibility Award.

Learn More PDF YouTube